More housing pain could be in store for 2012

This Reuters story, reported largely from Northeast Ohio, will serve as a corrective for those of you who thought the strengthening economy was going to bring an end to the housing slump.Indeed, the news service says, “a painful Part Two of the slump looks set to unfold: Many more U.S. homeowners face the prospect of losing their homes this year as banks pick up the pace of foreclosures.”Mark Seifert, executive director of Empowering and Strengthening Ohio's People, a counseling group with 10 offices in Ohio, tells Reuters, “We are right back where we were two years ago. I would put money on 2012 being a bigger year for foreclosures than 2010.”He adds, “Last year was an anomaly, and not in a good way.” (In 2011, the "robo-signing" scandal, in which foreclosure documents were signed without properly reviewing individual cases, prompted banks to hold back on new foreclosures pending a settlement.)Numbers available so far this year back up Mr. Seifert's contention. For instance, mortgage servicing provider Lender Processing Services reported in early March that U.S. foreclosure starts jumped 28% in January. Although foreclosure starts were 50% or more lower than for the same period in 2010, those begun by Deutsche Bank were up 47%, while those of Wells Fargo rose 68%.Still caught up in the crisis is Daniel Burns, 52, a Garfield Heights resident who until December 2010 had spent his working life in the trucking industry as a long-haul driver and manager, Reuters reports. When daily loads at the small family business where he worked tailed off, he lost his job.

“Unable to cover his mortgage, Burns received a grant from a government fund using money repaid from the 2008 bank bailout,” the news service reports. “That grant is due to expire in early 2013 and Burns is holding out on hopeful comments from his former employer that he might get his job back if the economy recovers.”Mr. Burns tells Reuters flatly, “If things don't pick up, I will be out on the street.”

Mind over matter

Turns out there's an unexpected side to U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Youngstown.A Washington Postprofile of Rep. Ryan notes that he's a politician out of central casting: a five-term incumbent from the heartland, 38, Catholic, a star quarterback in high school who lives a few houses down from his childhood home in Niles.“So when he starts talking about his life-changing moment after the 2008 race, you're not expecting him to lean forward at the lunch table and tell you, with great sincerity, that this little story of American politics is about (a) a raisin and (b) nothing else,” The Post says.“You hold this one raisin right up to your mouth, but you don't put it in, and after a moment your mouth starts to water,” Rep. Ryan tells the newspaper, describing an exercise during a five-day retreat into the meditative technique of mindfulness, developed from centuries of Buddhist practice. “The teaching point is that your body responds to things outside of it, that there's a mind-body connection. It links to how we take on situations and how this results in a great deal of stress.”For Ryan, the raisin was the beginning of a transformation.“The retreat, conducted by Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, led Ryan on a search into how the practice of mindfulness — sitting in silence, losing oneself in the present moment — could be a tonic for what ails the body politic,” according to the newspaper.

In his new book, ”A Mindful Nation,” Rep. Ryan “details his travels across the country, to schools and companies and research facilities, documenting how mindfulness is relieving stress, improving performance and showing potential to reduce health-care costs,” The Post. reports.It is a prescription, he says, that can help the nation “better deal with the constant barrage of information that the Internet age delivers.”

We hope these numbers lie

If you want to believe this is going to be a big year for the Cleveland Indians, you might want to skip this post from Forbes.com, which uses stat guru Bill James' Pythagorean Wins formula to forecast the new baseball season.I won't get into the particulars of the math (not that I really could), but the formula amounts to a statistical model that relates a team's ratio of runs scored to runs allowed with its winning percentage. What Mr. James has found, essentially, is that some teams — mostly due to bad luck — win fewer games than they should, based on the runs scored/allowed ratio, while others win more than projected — in their case, due to good luck.The Indians, it turns out, were one of last year's luckier teams. By Mr. James' calculations, the 80-win Tribe should only have won 75 games last year, suggesting the team is not as good as some people might think it is.The best candidates for improvement this year? The San Diego Padres, who won eight fewer games last year than would have been expected, and the Indians' Central Division rivals, the Kansas City Royals, who won only 71 games in 2011 when the Pythagorean Wins formula indicated they should have won 78.But here's the great thing about sports: Teams get to go out on the field and prove mathematicians wrong.You also can follow me on Twitter for more news about business and Northeast Ohio.

Crain's Afternoon Report

The Crain's editorial team produces this email news alert every afternoon. Sign up to receive links to the day's business news and editors' blog entries.